The Consequences of Trump’s Refugee Narratives on the Social and Political World

Abstract

In recent years, the United States has undergone a shift in both societal cohesion and political normalcy, at large an effect of a previously unprecedented style of political cohesion. Beginning with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and following his presidency, he spoke about refugees, immigrants, and displaced people in astonishingly generalizing and disparaging terms. The president had a unique style of communication not only for the public and overwhelming way he negatively spoke about groups of people who were seeking entrance into the country but also for the manner in which he persuaded millions of people that he was an immigration panacea and was able to form such a loyal base of followers. Through this study I aim to analyze how Trump’s usage of alt-resilience and storytelling helped shape the social world in the United States from the years 2015-2020, as well as how the communicative creation of a sense of “others” prove advantageous to Trump’s political career. Trump’s communication is known to be disparaging and informal, but it has not been studied through the communication theory of resilience and the theory of narrative paradigm. It is crucial to understand both the construction and implications of Trump’s communication between the years of 2015 and 2020, for there have been significant social and political effects as a result. I gathered a sample of Trump’s political speeches through C-SPAN and analyzed them to understand more about what tactics he used to make his speech as persuasive as possible. I found time and time again that he told inflammatory stories about those seeking entrance into the United States that lacked in detail and fact, generated a sense of “us versus them” and victim mentality within American society, which encouraged attitudes of nativism and proved extremely divisive within the nation’s society.

Comments from Mentors

Claire's analysis of the political and social consequences of treating refugees and immigrants as threats to national prosperity and unity is an unfortunately prescient warning in this dangerous political moment. As a thoughtful critique of a complex and challenging element of political discourse, this piece represents the best of undergraduate communication research.

— Timothy Betts